Archive for August, 2009

For the next three posts, I’m going to be highlighting three areas of the Firefox user interface that could benefit from animation. Stephen Horlander and myself have been looking at Firefox with an eye towards where movement could make Firefox an easier, more appealing, and perhaps even faster experience with movement.

First, it should be asked why we would add animation Firefox. Animation in the browser is a tool, but not a goal unto itself. Wherever animation is used, it should be with a purpose (not “it looks cool”) and benefit to the user (not “makes user look cool.”)

Like many web technologies, animation is a useful but easily abused tool. The early web and the dawn of the .gif saw animation heinously overused with blinking, spinning, and scrolling animations added to sites because they looked cool.

As the web calmed down a bit and web and interactive design began to develop, designers and developers found that animation could be beneficial to users. For instance, it can make tasks seem more like real-world affordances, and thus easier to visually understand. It could give users feedback on how digital objects were being moved or manipulated. And yes, they could make interactive experiences more visually appealing.

The first area we feel could benefit from animation is the movement of toolbar items within their rows on the Firefox chrome. This includes buttons like Home and Reload, the bookmark bar, and tabs. Currently, these items can all be shifted and reordered, but little visual feedback is given for these tasks. For tabs, only a thin strip shows where a dragged tab will be dropped.

By adding animation to the process of rearranging items, not only will Firefox feel more lightweight and adaptable, but it will be more visually clear what the user is manipulating and how the UI will be changed by letting go. For instance, animations of tabs being manipulated is essentially live preview of tab rearrangement: if a tab is slid to the right and an animation shows it doing so, releasing it only makes permanent what is being shown. This is similar to the tab animation motion currently in Safari and Chrome.

Because tab tearoff and tab rearrangement would utilize similar mouse movement, some thresholds should be added to prevent users from accidentally performing an unintended action. As Shorlander recommended, a “soft snap” could make tabs within a region of the tab bar slide, and falling outside that region causes them to tear off.

Slight animation could also give newly created tabs the feeling of organic growth into the browser.

In my last blog post about live video controls, I post some sketches of a prototype which could store some live video in a buffer for playback. Thanks to everyone for the feedback, which was all useful. I did want to draw attention to one point that James Heaver touched on: different uses of live video benefit from different ways of displaying the current time. James uses the example of watching a live football game, where knowing what quarter the game is in is more useful than knowing the actual time. In other cases, knowing the actual time (“4:30pm”) rather than the relative time (“you’ve watched for 4 minutes”) is more useful. Here’s some examples of uses for live video that could require different time displays:

As we develop the video controls, allowing developers the flexibility to decide which display time and/or labels suite their content will be important. Some video players today allow for toggling between relative and absolute time by clicking the timestamp: certainly an easy way to allow for both, if not very discoverable. We may find there’s other ways to improve usability for high traffic events, such as sports games or shuttle launches, by storing buffered video remotely rather than having users buffer it individually. Gerv points out that dynamically degrading video over time can allow for more content to be buffered, and Faaborg notes that there are instances that the user may want to save as much video as possible: two excellent points, which stress that making the video tag open and adaptable for the many kinds of content it can display is a primary objective.